The poems posthumous and collected of Thomas Lovell Beddoes

There is a mighty, magic tree,
That holds the round earth and the sea
In its branches like a net:
Its immortal trunk is set
Broader than the tide of night
With its star-tipped billows bright:
Human thought doth on it grow,
Like the barren misletoe
On an old oak's forehead-skin.
Ever while the planets spin
Their blue existence, that great plant
Shall nor bud nor blossom want;
Summer, winter, night and day,
It must still its harvest pay;
Ever while the night grows up
Along the wall of the wide sky,
And the thunder-bee sweeps by,
On its brown, wet wing, to dry
Every day-star's crystal cup

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Of its yellow summer:—still
At the foot of heaven's hill,
With fruit and blossom flush and rife,
Stays that tree of Human Life.

Let us mark yon newest bloom
Heaving through the leafy gloom;
Now a pinkish bud it grows
Scentless, bloomless; slow unclose
Its outer pages to the sun,
Opened, but not yet begun.
Its first leaf is infancy,
Pencilled pale and tenderly,
Smooth its cheek and mild its eye:
Now it swells, and curls its head,—
Little infancy is shed.
Broader childhood is the next— [OMITTED]

THE NEW-BORN STAR.

The world is born to-day!
What is the world?—Behold the wonder:
With a mighty thunder,
'Round the sun, it rolls this way;
And its shadow falls afar
Over many a star,
And the interstellar vale,

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Through which some aged, patient globe,
(Whose gaunt sides no summers robe,)
Like a prisoner through his grate,
Shivering in despair doth wait
For sunbeams broken, old, and pale.

Bounding, like its own fleet deer
Down a hill, behold the sphere!
Now a mountain, tall and wide,
Hanging weighty on its side
Pulls it down impetuously;
Yet the little butterfly,
Whom the daisy's dew doth glut,
With his wings' small pages shut,
Was not stirred.
Now forests fall, like clouds that gather
O'er the plain's unruffled weather:
Burst great rocks, with thunder, out:
Lakes, their plunged feet about,
Round, and smooth, and heaving ever,
An unawakened serpent-river
Coiled and sleeping.
Silver changes now are creeping
'Round the descending summit of the ball:
Pastures break, and stedfast land
Sinks, melting:—mighty ocean is at hand.—
Space for eternal waves! Be strong and wide,
Thou new-born star! Reflecting all the sky,

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And its lone sun, the island-starred tide
Swells billowing by.
At last the dreadful sea is curled
Behind the nations. Mark ye now
The death-intending wrinkles of his brow?
He is the murderous Judas of the world; [OMITTED]
What valley green with stream and tree,
The fairest, sweetest place, [OMITTED]

THRENODY.

No sunny ray, no silver night,
Here cruelly alight!
Glare of noon-tide, star of e'en,
Otherwhere descend!
No violet-eyed green,
With its daisies' yellow end,
The dewy debt receive of any eye!
It is a grave: and she doth lie
'Neath roses' root,
And the fawn's mossy foot,
Under the sky-lark's grassy floor,
Whose graceful life held every day,—
As lilies, dew—as dews, the starry ray—
More music, grace, delight than they.

211

When stars are few let light be here,
Of the softest, through the boughs
Berry-laden, sad and few;
And the wings of one small bird,
His form unseen, his voice unheard— [OMITTED]

LINES, WRITTEN AT GENEVA; JULY, 1824.

The hour is starry, and the airs that stray,
Sad wanderers from their golden home of day,
On night's black mountain, melt and fade away
In sorrow that is music. Some there be
Make them blue pillows on Geneva's sea,
And sleep upon their best-loved planet's shade:
And every herb is sleeping in the glade;—
They have drunk sunshine and the linnet's song,
Till every leaf's soft sleep is dark and strong.
Or was there ever sound, or can what was
Now be so dead? Although no flowers or grass
Grow from the corpse of a deceased sound,
Somewhat, methinks, should mark the air around
Its dying place and tomb,
A gentle music, or a pale perfume:
For hath it not a body and a spirit,
A noise and meaning? and, when one doth hear it

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Twice born, twice dying, doubly found and lost,
That second self, that echo, is its ghost.
But even the dead are all asleep this time,
And not a grave shakes with the dreams of crime:—
The earth is full of chambers for the dead,
And every soul is quiet in his bed;
Some who have seen their bodies moulder away,
Antediluvian minds,—most happy they,
Who have no body but the beauteous air,
No body but their minds. Some wretches are
Now lying with the last and only bone
Of their old selves, and that one worm alone
That ate their heart: some, buried just, behold
The weary flesh, like an used mansion, sold
Unto a stranger, and see enter it
The earthquake winds and waters of the pit,
Or children's spirits in its holes to play. [OMITTED]

STANZAS. (FROM THE IVORY GATE.)

The mighty thought of an old world
Fans, like a dragon's wing unfurled,
The surface of my yearnings deep;
And solemn shadows then awake,
Like the fish-lizard in the lake,
Troubling a planet's morning sleep.

213

My waking is a Titan's dream,
Where a strange sun, long set, doth beam
Through Montezuma's cypress bough:
Through the fern wilderness forlorn
Glisten the giant harts' great horn,
And serpents vast with helmed brow.

The measureless from caverns rise
With steps of earthquake, thunderous cries,
And graze upon the lofty wood;
The palmy grove, through which doth gleam
Such antediluvian ocean's stream,
Haunts shadowy my domestic mood.

[OMITTED]

LINES WRITTEN IN SWITZERLAND.

What silence drear in England's oaky forest,
Erst merry with the redbreast's ballad song
Or rustic roundelay! No hoof-print on the sward,
Where sometime danced Spenser's equestrian verse
Its mazy measure! Now by pathless brook
Gazeth alone the broken-hearted stag,
And sees no tear fall in from pitiful eye
Like kindest Shakespeare's. We, who marked how fell
Young Adonais, sick of vain endeavour
Larklike to live on high in tower of song;

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And looked still deeper thro' each other's eyes
At every flash of Shelley's dazzling spirit,
Quivering like dagger on the breast of night,—
That seemed some hidden natural light reflected
Upon time's scythe, a moment and away;
We, who have seen Mount Rydal's snowy head
Bound round with courtly jingles; list so long
Like old Orion for the break of morn,
Like Homer blind for sound of youthful harp;
And, if a wandering music swells the gale,
'Tis some poor, solitary heartstring burst.
Well, Britain; let the fiery Frenchman boast
That at the bidding of the charmer moves
Their nation's heart, as ocean 'neath the moon
Silvered and soothed. Be proud of Manchester,
Pestiferous Liverpool, Ocean-Avernus,
Where bullying blasphemy, like a slimy lie,
Creeps to the highest church's pinnacle,
And glistening infects the light of heaven.
O flattering likeness on a copper coin!
Sit still upon your slave-raised cotton ball,
With upright toasting fork and toothless cat:
The country clown still holds her for a lion.
The voice, the voice! when the affrighted herds
Dash heedless to the edge of craggy abysses,
And the amazed circle of scared eagles
Spire to the clouds, amid the gletscher clash
When avalanches fall, nation-alarums,—

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But clearer, though not loud, a voice is heard
Of proclamation or of warning stern.

Yet, if I tread out of the Alpine shade,
And once more weave the web of thoughtful verse,
May no vainglorious motive break my silence,
Since I have sate unheard so long, in hope
That mightier and better might assay
The potent spell to break, which has fair Truth
Banished so drear a while from mouths of song.
Though genius, bearing out of other worlds
New freights of thought from fresh-discovered mines,
Be but reciprocated love of Truth:
Witness kind Shakespeare, our recording angel,
Newton, whose thought rebuilt the universe,
And Galileo, broken-hearted seer,
Who, like a moon attracted naturally,
Kept circling round the central sun of Truth.
Not in the popular playhouse, or full throng
Of opera-gazers longing for deceit;
Not on the velvet day-bed, novel-strewn,
Or in the interval of pot and pipe;
Not between sermon and the scandalous paper,
May verse like this ere hope an eye to feed on't.
But if there be, who, having laid the loved
Where they may drop a tear in roses' cups,
With half their hearts inhabit other worlds;
If there be any—ah! were there but few—
Who watching the slow lighting up of stars,

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Lonely at eve, like seamen sailing near
Some island-city where their dearest dwell,
Cannot but guess in sweet imagining,—
Alas! too sweet, doubtful, and melancholy,—
Which light is glittering from their loved one's home:
Such may perchance, with favourable mind,
Follow my thought along its mountainous path.

Now then to Caucasus, the cavernous.— [OMITTED]

DOOMSDAY.

If I can raise one ghost, why I will raise
And call up doomsday from behind the east.
Awake then, ghostly doomsday!
Throw up your monuments, ye buried men
That lie in ruined cities of the wastes!
Ye battle fields, and woody mountain sides,
Ye lakes and oceans, and ye lava floods
That have o'erwhelmed great cities, now roll back!
And let the sceptred break their pyramids,
An earthquake of the buried shake the domes
Of arched cathedrals, and o'erturn the forests,
Until the grassy mounds and sculptured floors,
The monumental statues, hollow rocks,
The paved churchyard, and the flowery mead,
And ocean's billowy sarcophagi,

217

Pass from the bosoms of the rising people
Like clouds! Enough of stars and suns immortal
Have risen in heaven: to-day, in earth and sea
Riseth mankind. And first, yawn deep and wide,
Ye marble palace-floors,
And let the uncoffined bones, which ye conceal,
Ascend, and dig their purple murderers up,
Out of their crowned death. Ye catacombs
Open your gates, and overwhelm the sands
With an eruption of the naked millions,
Out of old centuries! The buried navies
Shall hear the call, and shoot up from the sea,
Whose wrecks shall knock against the hollow mountains,
And wake the swallowed cities in their hearts.
Forgotten armies rattle with their spears
Against the rocky walls of their sepulchres:
An earthquake of the buried shakes the pillars
Of the thick-sown cathedrals; guilty forests,
Where bloody spades have dug 'mid nightly storms;
The muddy drowning-places of the babes;
The pyramids, and bony hiding places, [OMITTED]

“Thou rainbow on the tearful lash of doomsday's morning star
Rise quick, and let me gaze into that planet deep and far,
As into a loved eye;
Or I must, like the fiery child of the Vesuvian womb,

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Burst with my flickering ghost abroad, before the sun of doom
Rolls up the spectre sky.”

A lowly mound, at stormy night, sent up this ardent prayer
Out of a murderer's grave, a traitor's nettly bed,
And the deeds of him, more dread than Cain, whose wickedness lay there,
All mankind hath heard or read.

“Oh doomsday, doomsday come! thou creative morn
Of graves in earth, and under sea, all teeming at the horn
Of angels fair and dread.
As thou the ghosts shalt waken, so I, the ghost, wake thee;
For thy rising sun and I shall rise together from the sea,
The eldest of the dead.”

So crying, o'er the billowy main, an old ghost strode
To a churchyard on the shore,
O'er whose ancient corpse the billowy main of ships had ebbed and flowed,
Four thousand years or more. [OMITTED]

“World, wilt thou yield thy spirits up, and be convulsed and die?

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And, as I haunt the billowy main, thy ghost shall haunt the sky,
A pale unheeded star.
Oh doomsday, doomsday, when wilt thou dawn at length for me?”
So having prayed in moonlight waves, beneath the shipwrecked sea,
In spectral caverns far,
On moonlight, o'er the billowy main, the old ghost stepped,
And the winds their mockery sung. [OMITTED]

THRENODY.

Far away,
As we hear
The song of wild swans winging
Through the day,
The thought of him, who is no more, comes ringing
On my ear.

Gentle fear
On the breast
Of my memory comes breaking,
Near and near,
As night winds' murmurous music waking
Seas at rest.

220

As the blest
Tearful eye
Sees the sun, behind the ocean,
Red i'th' west,
Grow pale, and in changing hues and fading motion
Wane and die:

So do I
Wake or dream

[OMITTED]

University of Virginia Library

POETIC FRAGMENTS.

THE TREE OF LIFE.

THE NEW-BORN STAR.

THRENODY.

LINES, WRITTEN AT GENEVA; JULY, 1824.

STANZAS. (FROM THE IVORY GATE.)

LINES WRITTEN IN SWITZERLAND.

DOOMSDAY.

THRENODY.